Historian Musicant (Divided Waters, 1995) offers a detailed examination of the American war that catapulted the nation to imperial status. Beginning with the political conflicts that brought William McKinley to the presidency, Musicant offers a portrait of a nation increasingly torn between the desire for isolation and the yearning for a place on the international stage. That conflict was at first fought out in the nation's newspapers, which, by focusing on Spanish atrocities against Cubans fighting for independence, managed to gradually sway public opinion toward involvements abroad. The sinking of the American warship Maine in the harbor of Havana (blamed, without much evidence, on a Spanish mine), pushed America over the edge, and a reluctant McKinley was compelled to declare war on Spain. The war itself lasted less than a year (from April 21, 1898, to March 19, 1899) and featured only a few large-scale battles, but Musicant is able to wring considerable drama from this thorough narrative of events. He draws heavily on primary American and Spanish sources, including the memoirs of Teddy Roosevelt, who led the famous charge up San Juan Hill. As Musicant points out, that charge was far bloodier than suspected; indeed, raw American troops often found themselves facing well-entrenched foes. At sea it was a different story: Admiral Dewey demolished an entire Spanish squadron at Manila Bay, securing the Philippines as American troops were seizing Cuba. While his narrative of the war is thorough, clear, and vivid, Musicant seems to scant the war's larger meanings, such as Roosevelt's 1900 election as vice president and a festering guerrilla war in the Philippines. The conclusion is only weak by comparison, however, as Musicant offers a meticulous yet exciting narrative of a small war that carried large implications for the nation's future. (8 pages b&w photos, 8 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-3500-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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